


The Bittern In The Reeds

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: Coping Mechanisms, Disability, Freedom, Friendship, Gen, Identity Issues, No character bashing, Post-Apocalypse, Turks - Freeform, Wutai War, but Shinra is an evil institution, kidnapping mention, personal agency, reno's are clearly weird, technically, that was the working title, tseng gets out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 04:10:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16318901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Tseng woke up one day, two years and eleven months after Meteorfall, and realized that he hated being a Turk.





	The Bittern In The Reeds

**Author's Note:**

> Can you believe AO3 doesn't consider 'Tseng & Cissnei' or 'Tseng & Veld' to be plausible tags? Even once I'd typed them out in full the drop-down menu was still all 'did you mean: Tseng/Veld? Maybe Tseng/Reno? Tseng/Rufus?' 
> 
> Apparently our boy is a memetic stud of some sort. (Okay, more realistically, he's a Little Black Dress.)
> 
> Anyway a bittern is a sort of wading bird that runs on the small side of its cousin the heron. They fly with their necks all scrunched up. Please in this case visualize the black bittern, which is native to tropical Asia-Pacifica and tends to be about two feet long but hard to spot, as it is noted for its skulking.

Tseng woke up one day, two years and eleven months after Meteorfall, and realized that he hated being a Turk.

As this had always been approximately as useful an observation as hating being a human being, and rather less productive than hating being male would have been, or dark-haired, or of his particular height, he almost tucked the thought away into a folder of irrelevancies to be discarded, as perhaps he had a dozen or a hundred times before.

But then he stopped. Just before putting it away. And turned it over. And really _looked_ at it.

After a little while, he got out of bed and put on his uniform. It was morning, after all. He combed his hair out and left it loose.

The concept sitting in his mind, still not slipped away into its reject folder, seemed to wobble and roll as he went through these everyday motions, as though it were a heavy round stone balanced in the palm of his hand, or the curve of his shoulder.

He stepped out into the living area that connected all the rooms on this floor, and ground to a halt. The table that made one portion of the open floor plan into a dining area was lined with glass bottles—over a dozen of beer. One of vodka. Two of whiskey. About half of the total contents were gone. Only one person was seated at the table, and from the looks of things had already been there for hours.

Clearly he was not the only one who remembered what day it was.

“Reno,” he said.

Reno looked up. A little blearier than he usually let himself get, because you couldn’t be drunk on duty, and especially now that there were only four of them, a Turk was never truly not on duty.

The hard-boiled cynicism that had always been as much part of Reno as the Midgar under-streets had been softening, in the years since Shinra fell. He smiled more. He laughed, for purposes other than mockery. His sloppiness seemed less affected. He was openly fond of Rude, and could be heard occasionally making remarks that strayed close to optimistic about the future of the world, which the old Reno wouldn’t have considered worth talking about at all, let alone idealistically.

In defiance of basic mathematics, the man seemed younger every day.

But today all that was gone, and this was the old Reno looking up at him, all hard edges and indifference, and about twice the drunkenness.

“Yeah, boss?”

Tseng didn’t need to ask, and he didn’t want to comment. “Are you planning to still be there when the President comes out?” he inquired tonelessly.

Rufus thankfully had the mobility to get himself in and out of his chair, clothed, and bathed without assistance on all but the worst days, though he liked to make a show in public of total helplessness. He’d learned the value of being underestimated, in this strange new world where his power was attenuated enough that with carelessness it might altogether snap.

Reno cast his eye over the rows of bottles thoughtfully. If he’d been drinking all night, he clearly considered himself only about half done. Had probably scheduled himself to pass out around noon and sleep through until tomorrow. “This one wasn’t on him,” he observed judiciously. Then shrugged. “What the hell. He’ll cope.”

He uncorked the half-full vodka and tipped it generously into the bottom of his glass—he appeared to have made some kind of compromise between customary liquor and beer volumes because it was a half-height tumbler, of thoroughly average dimensions. Reno swigged from the cup and looked up at Tseng again. “Want some?”

Vodka was made from distilling a fermented combination of rice and kiri roots; it was one of the signature beverages of Wutai, and it was _terrible_. Tseng had definitely missed out on whatever gene rendered the stuff palatable. He also didn’t typically drink at six in the morning, even on days that tempted him. “No thanks.”

Reno shrugged. “Suit yourself.” And he applied himself back to his drinking.

Rather than vodka, Tseng’s breakfast was a day-old roll, cut in half with cheese in the middle. He disposed of the crumbs, spent a while watching Reno drink, and then when no responsibilities beyond monitoring Reno for alcohol poisoning symptoms presented themselves, decided to step out for some air.

It was _fresh_ air, which was still a nice change of pace this long after the fall of Midgar. Rufus’ private lodge at Healen had continued to be their main base, even after Geostigma had been cured and the clinic downhill become less crowded. They maintained also their initial post-Fall location in Kalm, and the new Shinra HQ in Edge, but those were just for working out of. The lodge was comfortable, in a way nowhere in the endless construction noise of Edge City could be, and private.

 _And_ within a reasonable distance of both Midgar and Kalm, without being in the way of the catastrophes that kept striking large human settlements these days. It was one thing to be working hard to rebuild the world, but another altogether to be _stupid_ about it.

The rooftop balcony was really meant for relaxing fresh air recuperation, but it was a little cold out for that today, and anyway Tseng had always thought of the place mostly as a sniper post.

It had line of sight to the road up the hills, and to the top of the nearby cliff where an enemy gunman might try to shoot down onto Healen. It allowed one weapon to cover both main entrances to the Shinra lodge and, far below, the less obvious door giving on the elevator that descended to ground level, and the helipad that lay only a hundred meters’ distance from it.

They didn’t actually _have_ a sniper on the team, of course, but there were long-range weapons stored in easy reach inside the lodge, and either Tseng or Rufus could use them adequately in extremity. Reno and Rude slightly less well. If there was warning enough of a coming attack to take defensive posts to begin with.

In a hypothetical catastrophe where there was a sufficiently long timeline to fall back to this base with additional personnel, Vincent Valentine was near the top of the recruitment list.

Mist hung low in the valley. It could conceal a subtle enemy, if there was one.

Tseng turned his back on the entire vista, leaned his weight on the wooden safety railing, and took out his PHS. Flipped it open, and dialed a certain number from memory.

The phone rang six times. Just when Tseng started to think it was not only not going to be answered, but not equipped with a voicemail box, it beeped into connection.

“Yes?”

Veld sounded the same as ever. Flat. Bland. Slightly impatient. He didn’t ask who was calling him, in case that gave too much away.

“Could you put Shuriken on, please?” Tseng asked.

The line was silent for a second. “Two and a half years,” his old mentor said slowly, “without your initiating contact. Even when the world turned out to have been ending again.” When this didn’t provoke any attempt at justification, “Why this now?”

“You taught me how to be a Turk,” said Tseng, with all the clinical precision he had ever brought to bear. “But I…don’t think you’re the right person to tell me how to be an ex-Turk.”

Because Veld had been other things, first. And besides. Veld had been a son and a man and a husband and a father. For Veld, there had been a ‘before’ Shinra. His ‘after’ Shinra could be built up from its fragments, or on its model.

That wasn’t a resource Tseng had, because for him there had never been a ‘before’ Shinra. Any more than there had been for Shuriken. Or for Aerith. (Or for Sephiroth. Or, in fairness, for Rufus, though the company had never meant the same things to him that it did to anyone else.)

“…Ah,” said Veld. He then must have taken the PHS away from his face and covered it, because his voice was somewhat muffled when he called, “Cissnei!” Then, at the normal volume again, “She’s coming.”

Tseng hummed acknowledgment. A pause. Minimal rustle, as the phone was handed over. A woman’s voice: “Hello?”

“You’re going by Cissnei again?” Tseng asked.

“It’s my name.”

“…ah.”

Not the name she’d been born with, of course—Tseng had never been sure whether she knew that name herself. He didn’t. Her code name had always been enough, between Turks, and outside the Department she’d taken others on and off the way someone who didn’t live in uniform might articles of clothing.

“What do you need, Tseng?” her voice grew less brisk, and more patient, as she obviously noticed this was not precisely a business call.

“How did you…” Pause. “Decide to leave the company?” It wasn’t quite the right question.

“Oh,” said Cissnei. “You mean, where did I find my resolve? Or how did I _know?_ ”

It hadn’t been the right question, but he’d still been understood.

There was no one better to ask. She hadn’t made the choice he was faced with, of course—she’d left in a group, with the others. She hadn’t had to walk away from everything at once. Even if they _had_ been accepting, at the time, the real though minor likelihood of Shinra deciding they were worth hunting down after all, and the hunters sent after them not defecting as well.

But she was the only one he could ask for guidance in this. He’d always walked before her, all their lives. Now it was her turn to illuminate a path for the other child of the Turks.

(They hadn’t grown up together. Tseng had been thirteen and ready for basic missions when the department had taken Cissnei in, a very small orphan with a talent. He’d watched her grow up, though. Her and Aerith, in and outside of Shinra. So much alike, and so very different.)

“I don’t remember,” she said thoughtfully. “Ever really _not_ knowing. That I wanted….

“I remember being a little girl, on a training mission in Midgar, and watching a cluster of pigeons on a roof near the edge of the Plate. And then the wind kicked up, and they all took off in a disgruntled cloud, and scattered…some of them deeper into the city, and some out over the wall, and away. I…picked up a feather.”

“…ah,” said Tseng again.

The sky. How did it always come back to the sky. He glanced up at it overhead, where he stood in the present. Overcast, and uninspiring. Tseng had always enjoyed flying, though he had never quite been the best helicopter pilot the department had, but the symbolism of it was lost on him. ‘Up’ was only another direction, if one Shinra was always particularly fond of.

“I used to dream about having wings,” Cissnei said. “Especially during the war.”

The war. She hadn’t had nearly as many missions behind the front lines as he had, of course, because hostilities had concluded when she was barely seventeen, but it was still her war.

Both of them had been intended as anti-Wutai weapons. Tseng had almost been discarded outright at age nine, when someone finally noticed that three years without hearing Wutaian spoken had caused him to forget almost all of it, removing his special usefulness as a spy, but luckily Veld had by then noticed his potential, and kept him alive.

Cissnei had been trained as Shuriken because the exasperating mid-range weapons were so much more devastating than guns, when used correctly, and it had been annoying to keep lifting powerful weapons off the bodies of dead ninja and having no one to use them.

There had been a beat of anxiety through both their childhoods: _What if the war ends, and I haven’t yet been put into the fight? Then what is the point of me?_ Fortunately for them, if you assumed survival was always desirable, which Tseng made a point of doing, it had taken Shinra over a decade to win, and by then they’d proven themselves.

“I told Zack, once…” Cissnei mused. “You know he was always oddly easy to talk to.”

He gave a soft hum of agreement. Zack and Aerith had been very well matched. In a better world, they would have grown old together. And all Tseng had ever been able to do for either of them was postpone his betrayals.

“I told him,” Cissnei continued, “that wings symbolized freedom for those who have none. It’s the closest I ever really came to saying that I…wanted to escape. Of course, he didn’t understand.” She sounded fond. “But I knew I could trust him, even if he did.”

Zack had always been easy to trust. It had been hard for him, Tseng thought, being trusted, after that disastrous mission to Icicle. What did you do, when your sworn duty and your duty to the people who trusted you collided?

Zack had never truly been forced to make that choice, because Commander Hewley had chosen to die rather than fight Shinra, and in the end Shinra had betrayed Zack completely and forfeited his loyalty before he was forced to choose. But there had never really been any question. Zack’s loyalties had always been to people rather than institutions.

Maybe, in another lifetime, Tseng would have been the same.

“Yes,” was all he said.

“But you…” she paused. “You never said anything before, did you.” It wasn’t really a question, so he didn’t answer. “To anyone.”

Of course not. He wasn’t Cissnei. He had never been a dreamer. He had never allowed himself to think, _maybe._ There had only ever been, very rarely, _if only._

“I don’t know what to tell you, Tseng,” she confessed. “You have skills. You can make it in the world. You know that.” He…did know that. “There’s no one who can stop you or drag you back, if you walk away now.” Could Reno and Rude working together take him down? Most probably. Would they? Now? For this?

…probably not.

“And we’ll be here,” Cissnei said. “Veld and I, at least. If you need us. Just call.”

“You really think Veld will—”

“He will. For you. For this. You know he will.”

Tseng drew in breath, perhaps to argue, and Cissnei said, “Tseng. He owes you. We all do.”

He frowned, taken off-balance. “What?”

“You stayed behind.”

It had never occurred to Tseng to think of it that way. That he had stayed behind, been _left_ behind, like a man covering his comrades’ retreat. He’d known his duty. That was all. For Veld to leave, he had to remain; he hadn’t considered going; a Turk was all he’d ever been; he hadn’t been _betrayed_ in the same way Veld had.

And if he’d left, who would stand for the Turks? Who would pull strings for Zack? Who would maintain the thin veil of plausible deniability protecting Aerith?

Not that he’d made any difference, in the end.

He…hadn’t even…considered it. Because it had been so obvious that _someone_ had to stay.

He hadn’t even considered it.

“People say that people like us are selfish,” Cissnei said. “Choosing to do whatever the company needs, no matter how dirty it is, in exchange for a paycheck. That all we care about is our own convenience. And maybe it’s true. All of us have debts to pay. I know you feel that way, too.”

Tseng made a small, wordless sound of agreement. That was what he had been doing, these past almost-three years, wasn’t it? The new Shinra was working to mend what the old Shinra had broken. Tseng had _broken_ so many things for the company and barely bothered to care about most of them, but they still added up. Even for someone like _Reno_ , they added up, and Reno was ever so much better than Tseng had ever been at not caring.

“But Tseng, even if that’s what we’ll both do for the rest of our lives, you…need to try taking care of yourself, for once.”

He couldn’t see her smile over the phone line, of course, but it was in her voice when she spoke again. “I think by now you’ve earned your wings.”

* * *

When Tseng came back down from the roof, Reno and his bottles had disappeared. He crossed the room and stuck his head into Rude’s room—empty. The quiet Turk had probably woken up, discovered his partner being a mess all over the common area, and taken him away somewhere private. Rude had always been good at that side of the job. Making problems quietly disappear.

Elena had had the midnight guard shift. She was still in her bed—not sleeping quietly, because she did not have that gift, nor experience serving in a war zone that might have taught it to her, but her knee jutting out of the tangle of blankets and wordless dream-mumbling were the hallmarks of a _sound_ sleep, anyway.

He didn’t check behind the last door. The sound of water from the private bathroom in that suite had only just shut off, which told him all he needed to know.

He couldn’t talk to the others, before he went. They could always come after him, later, if they decided they needed him more than they needed to be Turks.

He couldn’t afford to let them try to change his mind.

But there was one goodbye he did need to make, and so he waited.

The sound of wheels approached, and then the door unlatched. Swung open, inward. The occupant rolled himself carefully back from the spot to its left he’d been in to be able to reach the handle without blocking the door, and then forward out into the room.

Tseng stayed where he was throughout this operation. There was nothing unusual about that; it was important to his employer to manage as many small things on his own as he reasonably could. By evening he would be more amenable to having doors opened for him, if he had had a busy day and was growing too tired to demand extra effort from himself just to prove his capacity.

Rufus needed them. Or at least, he needed someone. He had never been self-sufficient in his life and now it would be especially difficult. The world only had so many ramps, so many elevators, so many sinks and countertops built low enough to access from a chair. And the fragile remains of the dignity of the Shinra President lay heavily in the impassive black suits flanking his shoulders, like a cloak of crows. He needed them.

But… _they_ didn’t need _Rufus_. Not anymore.

Reno was the one who had spoken for all of them, back when the decision had been made, that they had always been Turks and saw no reason to stop. Tseng had agreed, then. And maybe it was still true for Reno. But for all the obligation he felt toward Rufus…Tseng didn’t _need_ him.

And for all Rufus respected the Turks more than his father ever had….

“Would you fry a few eggs, Tseng?” Rufus asked absently, rolling himself toward the windows where he parked to enjoy the view as he knotted his tie. “And after breakfast we’ll need the helicopter, I want to visit the offices today and make sure Anders is still on-task. We’ll be shutting down next month for the Meteorfall observances just like everyone, and there are a number of projects that need to be _finished_ by then.”

It took Rufus a while to realize Tseng’s silent gaze on him was not quite usual. Tseng waited patiently for it. He had no urgency to communicate his intentions, really, and he didn’t mind taking his time to take a last, long look at his President.

This man who had been a boy who used them as disposable tools, who had grown to adulthood under their guard. Who had won their loyalty in the end by understanding they were the most valuable weapons he had.

The Rufus of today was not what he had been, any more than Reno was the same, or Tseng, or even Elena. (It was hard to say how or whether Rude had changed. He kept his own council best of them all.) Rufus’ vision of his power, now, centered around preparing against threats to the Planet, against death; he had found better struggles than the one against being defined by the way his father had ruled the world. But even now…

Tseng had long been tired of being part of someone else’s power. This life was so much better than the one he used to live, he’d thought he wanted nothing more.

And it wasn’t about wanting more. Not really. It was about wanting….

Yes. It was about wanting. Just that.

His suit and cuffs properly aligned, Rufus ran his fingers over his still-damp hair, checking for disorder, then seemed to finally notice Tseng was still standing and staring at him, instead of proceeding over to the kitchen area to fry eggs.

Rufus actually could fry his own eggs, probably without setting anything on fire. But it would cost him, because he would have to stand to reach the range top, and even aside from the energy it took to be on his feet for long, pushing beyond his limits too much or too often would worsen the daily pain, and make it harder to stand later on. Giving such a job to Tseng would have been the sensible division of labor even if he hadn’t been the employee.

Tseng didn’t mind being asked to fry eggs. But he wasn’t going to do it, not today.

“Do you know what day it is?” he asked, in the face of Rufus’ growing perturbation.

“…June seventeenth,” Rufus said after a moment. Feeling his way cautiously along the conversation, eyes narrow now. “A Phoenixday.”

“It’s the third anniversary of the night the Turks dropped the Sector Seven plate.”

The smell of dust and mako and broken metal where the Plate had fallen, a day later, as the television called it the greatest act of terrorism in recorded history. The touch of Aerith’s face against his palm as he slapped her silent, maintaining his plausible deniability. The hate in her new friends’ eyes hadn’t meant anything to him then but the success of his act, and the chance someone might help her escape again, now that he had finally captured her, but it lingered in his memory and mattered differently, now.

Only a Shinra Company officer could cancel the plate release once it was activated. That hadn’t included Tseng, though it should have—Administrative Research had always been a step below the other Departments in status, a half-acknowledged shadow department that did the scutwork of the President’s will. To make sure it was the President the fear they engendered fell upon, he thought, and not themselves. To make certain the terror of the Turks could never be turned against him.

(Rufus never had been as different from his old man as he had wanted.)

Reno had not tried to get out of doing his duty, though he’d perhaps dragged his feet at it somewhat.

Tseng had leaked the plan, counting on it to race through the slum gossip channels in the half hour they’d had between order and execution, and lessen the casualty count, because the people of the undercity had for the most part been very realistic about Shinra, but he had not asked Rufus to use the little authority he had as titular-Vice-President-under-house-arrest to intervene.

He could have done it. It would have shown his hand, pushed him deeper into his father’s bad books—there was nothing the former President had hated more than to be overruled—but Rufus _had_ had that power. He could have, if nothing else, gained the evacuation some more time. Tseng had not suggested it. He’d known the answer would be no. There had been nothing for the President’s heir to gain.

Nothing at all, let alone anything worth using up his _one_ use of plausible deniability to overreach his boundaries and hijack company resources. Tseng hadn’t even tried to ask it of him.

How many times over the years had he never even tried, because he knew the thing was impossible? Or because he didn’t care enough to spend his limited latitude in a place where he had no personal stake?

How many times had he said to himself, _it has to be this way._ How many times had that been the truth?

Understanding and confusion mingled on Rufus’ face.

“Reno’s drinking himself unconscious,” Tseng said, because he didn’t think Rufus knew that was becoming an annual ritual. Reno had always planned ahead enough to take the day off.

Reno wasn’t a man inclined to guilt. Any inclination toward it had always been met with a more aggressive disinterest in any feelings at all, and he wasn’t introspective by nature. Dropping the Plate hadn’t seemed to bother him much, at the time.

But the further that day receded into the past, the longer they spent involved in the cleanup of the Planet’s many disasters, the more often they were called upon to _help_ ; the more times Reno looked into the faces of the dying without the imperturbable colossus of Shinra behind him, furnishing its own justification for everything done in its name simply by holding all the world in its hands…the more time passed since they’d seen the Lifestream curl its way out of the sky in time to save their world, if not their city…the more his own dead seemed to matter to him.

Tseng thought maybe Reno was packing every bad feeling and thought that ever tried to plague him into one day a year. To let himself move forward, live and grow and care again without being crushed by who he’d been.

All of them had their own ways of coping. That was what it was, to be human.

“…I see,” Rufus murmured. There was something anxious in his eyes, now; he had felt the blow lurking in Tseng’s manner, though he had not yet guessed just what it was. Fear was not in his nature, but he was bracing for impact.

“I would like,” Tseng said, because there was no point in delaying any further, unless for cowardice or cruelty, “to tender my resignation as of this morning.”

The scar tissue around Rufus’ left eye kept it from widening as far as the other, leading to an asymmetric effect he hated, and therefore he would never have voluntarily made this expression in public. Maybe not even in front of Tseng. But he hadn’t been prepared for _this_ blow at all. Blinked hard. “Is there—some problem I’ve been unaware of?

Tseng felt a smile flicker. “You might say so.”

“Well, tell me then; I’ll see what I can do.” Brusque, impatient with the anxiety of losing Tseng, it was still a promise. One Rufus would probably do his genuine best to _keep_ , so long as Tseng’s requests were reasonable.

But this wasn’t something it was in his power to change. Not without changing every part of himself, and even then the past would follow them forever.

“Did you know,” Tseng said thoughtfully, “that Shinra killed my entire family?”

A sudden stillness in Rufus, as though he thought this might have been a recent discovery that prompted a paradigm shift in his Turk. As though he thought he might be in danger, being alone with his most trusted subordinate. “I don’t remember them,” Tseng assured him. “I’m not angry.” This was entirely true. He had never been able to understand such pointless grudges. “But that is how I joined the company. As the sole Wutaian survivor of the battle of Gua Do. I never had a…choice.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his coat, and came out with his employee ID.

It was the same one he’d had taken off him after being captured by Sephiroth’s Remnants, cleaned of blood and returned to him. He’d had it since before Meteorfall. It had once opened very nearly every door in Shinra Tower.

There had been so much authority involved in being a high-ranking Turk. Such a high clearance. And no power at all, except what you could steal when nobody was looking.

“It’s recently occurred to me,” he said, staring into his own photographed face as though he could read in it his own thoughts and better understand them, “that I…have them, now. Choices. I’ve chosen to follow you this far, because…”

Because he’d felt a debt to the man: for coming to the rescue at the end of the Turks’ long crisis, even if the crisis had been partly of his making; for making it possible for Tseng to survive protecting his mentor.

Because Rufus was President Shinra and Tseng was a Turk, and there was no other possibility so long as both those things were true.

Because there was a future to build, and Rufus had promised the Turks would get to help build it, and the remaining resources of the fallen Shinra were, even now, considerably more than any private individual could muster, even the world’s heroes, and so his side really was one of the most advantageous places from which to attempt that rebuilding.

Because this was where his people were, and the only familiar thing left in a broken world.

“…it seemed the thing to do.”

“Where do you want me to lead you?” Rufus was almost perfectly composed, still, but the hand closed on the armrest of his chair was tense, and his voice a little too flat. Betraying, if you knew him, what the question meant. The _offer_. To work harder at using them for _good_ more than for advantage; to let Tseng have a degree of input into the course they cut through the world that would have been beyond his wildest dreams five years ago.

Tseng shook his head. “It’s not what you’re doing.” It wasn’t even anything he’d done. “It’s…not your fault.” He tossed the ID gently, underhand, so that it landed in Rufus’ lap. “I’m going. You can’t change it.”

Rufus’ hand shifted slightly, as though he almost picked the card in its plastic sleeve up but then overruled the impulse. “I see.”

Tseng hesitated.

“You still have my number,” he told the President. “Feel free to call.” He tipped his head to one side, thoughtful.

They had known each other, it seemed to him suddenly, for…a very long time. Like Cissnei, like Aerith, Rufus was…someone he had watched grow up. Someone he had grown up, watching over. Whatever else might be true. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said, realizing the truth of the words as he said them, “trying to be your friend.”

Tseng had had friends before. Never close ones, never ones he hadn’t met through work, never ones he had been safe from having to betray…but he had _had_ them. Rufus, he was almost certain, never had.

Shinra had done to all of them what Midgar’s reactors had done to the plains. Scraped dry and bare in the quest for a power that had never meant anything, and never been meant to last.

He had not felt this peaceful since he had lain bleeding out in the Temple of the Ancients where Sephiroth had left him, and closed his eyes to the sight of Aerith’s scornful, composed defiance, and thought this was the end of his responsibilities.

It was time.

He turned away from Rufus’ silent stare. Maybe it was meant to be recriminating. Maybe the President was just, for once, speechless.

“Tseng,” said Rufus, proving his voice was still with him, as Tseng crossed toward the front room, and the front exit. Tseng paused, just inside the doorway, but didn’t look back. “Are you _sure?_ ”

He made a threat of it, of course. _There’s a whole world out there, ready to tear you apart._ _If you leave, you can never come back. Shinra is the only home you’ve ever known. You need me. You owe me. You can’t risk this._

But it was a question, all the same.

“Yes,” said Tseng, walking forward again. “I think, for once, I…am.”

His hands came up to unhook the short row of buttons along his abdomen. He slipped off the tailored black blazer that had been as much a part of him as his name for so many years, and hung it neatly over the back of a chair, before he opened the front door, and let himself out.

The air was damp and slightly chill, and landed heavy and sweet in his lungs, and a breeze ruffled over the thin white fabric of his shirt, stirring his hair and leaving him rather more chilled than he would have thought the loss of one layer could cause.

But it didn’t matter. The Department of Administrative Research had always been relatively well-compensated; its Head even more so. And Tseng had always had few wants, but copious habits of paranoia that had kept him from trusting all his savings to the Shinra central bank, which had collapsed and taken all its invested capital with it a little less than three years ago.

He had gil enough. He could buy himself new clothes. He could do anything he liked.

Tseng laid his hand on the railing, lightly, and began to make his way down the stairs toward the valley floor, and the road leading away.

The sun was beginning to show signs of breaking through the overcast, but by the time it could burn off the mist concealing his route, Tseng would be long gone.


End file.
